Jay, thanks for the price history and reflection on various scenarios. Following are a few clarifications of my own. (Please see also note at end.)
[...] BTC at $300 in 2016.... because that price did not exist in 2016...
By the way your reference to BTC prices touching upon $300 in 2016, is both factually inaccurate, but also just a kind of fantasylandia thinking that very many people would be able to buy BTC at a maximum dip price and to be able to lump sum buy into such a fantasy purchase.. It's just not realistic, even though quite a few members like to engage in those kind of fantasies regarding how they would be set if they ONLY were to have bought blah blah blah quantity of BTC at the maximum dippening point.
I do not live in fantasylandia, although I sometimes err due to the lability of human recollection. (On a general note, I have a longtime habit of ignoring the market altogether, unless I am actively buying or budgeting expenditure. I spent most of 2021 ignoring the market; until I reviewed the market in early 2022, I knew less about 2021 Bitcoin prices than most newbies.)
For $300 in 2016, I was thinking of a specific Bitcoin discount sale event that lasted for less than four minutes on one exchange. I have referred a few times to Slaying of the Bearwhale. For those who caught it on Stamp, it was indeed possible to make a large lump-sum buy at what was then about a 7% discount off prices immediately before and after. Wasn’t that in 2016? Or was that 2015? The video has disappeared from where I saved a copy long ago. Unfortunately, I did not save the metadata.
That brings to mind a general point—not aimed at you; just something that irritates me: There is
no such thing as a “Bitcoin price”. I think that most WO veterans very well understand that there are only averages of last sales or mid-market quotes from exchanges. Nonetheless, I think it’s important in the long term to educate people about how pricing works. Newbies tend to behave as if there is a Bitcoin retail store with a price on the shelf. And lack of comprehension of pricing lets dollar manipulation distort the markets.
An anecdote that illustrates the true nature of market pricing:
I sometimes like trading stablecoins against each other as (usually) low-risk trades; and I have sometimes hunted for opportunities in low-liquidity markets. It has happened that when UST was fully pegged, I bought UST for $0.95 and sold UST for $10. The latter happened only once, with a taker that hit only 1 UST from the amount that I had offered at ask price of 10 USDC—but I can brag that I made 10x profit selling $1 for $10! In terms of absolute profit, it was not as good as when some robot dumped $1000 on me for $950; and when I found the right opportunity, I have bought at least ten or twenty thousand dollars for between $0.96 and $0.99 each. At all times I here describe, the major price sites (CoinGecko, CMC, et al.) listed UST as consistently priced in a narrow band around $1; and in any higher-liquidity marketplace, most or all trades executed very close to $1.
So as for pricing.
(Yes, it is ruthless mercenary capitalist trading that you believe I denigrate. No, I do not feel in the least bit bad about having made honest trades at market. Although I
did add liquidity to a market that direly needed it, I do not pretend that I was providing some great service to humanity: I was making money by exploiting a zero-sum game in accord with its established rules. Whoever paid me $10 for $1 was at a $9 loss, and their loss was my gain!)
especially since you have already shown that you have difficulties maintaining a consistent HODL strategy and/or any kind of meaningful disinclination to gamble with whatever possibly extra BTC that you are able to accumulate -
Something that you missed or misunderstood from my prior posts; my posts have been sometimes voluminous, so I guessed you missed it earlier:
You said somewhere that, in effect, if I put
all of my BTC at risk on margin, it shows I am a gambler.
I did not risk all of my BTC at once.
I started by risking a limited amount, which I could have afforded to lose.
But I cannot stand losing BTC. Thus, at the moment I should have written off my losses, I instead added collateral until I was all-in.
I think I said somewhere that I wound up flailing about like an animal trapped in quicksand.
Another detail that I didn’t think was relevant before: Even after I was “all-in”, I was not
totally, catastrophically trapped until circumstances beyond my control stopped me from saving several leveraged long altcoin accounts from liquidation. I considered those high-risk, of course; that is why I refused to cross-margin those with my BTC, even though I could have. However, I was (too much) relying on the worst-case ability to salvage some significant equity from those accounts (here speaking of “equity” very strictly as “asset FMV minus debt”). The liquidator bot deleted tens of thousands of dollars worth of my equity. This had a domino effect on my overall position, and raised my risk level from “are you crazy?” to “make peace with whatever gods you may believe in: either you need a miracle, or you need to prepare to face your doom”.
What happened to me was significantly more complicated than the scenario of a typical newbie who gets wrecked buying BTC long on margin. But then, I am not a newbie. After making some terrifically stupid mistakes, I had enough skill managing my losses to avoid losing any BTC from January to May. Even after my other assets were gutted, I still managed to hang onto my BTC—
clinging to it—despite close shaves where I was almost liquidated. That took some luck—and a
lot of effort cleverly juggling what was left of my shrinking assets. If I still got utterly ruined, then newbies have no hope.
Just for my own attempt at clarifying a few points, I feel that I have pretty conservative ways of considering the valuation of entry-level fuck you status both because it uses the 200-week moving average at an attempt to have a conservative measurement of seemingly inevitable BTC price volatility, but also I had injected a kind of expectation that in western countries we need to achieve at least a double valuation of what would have constituted entry-level fuck you status and being a "millionaire" as compared with our understanding of the world and the retention of the value of our fiat money prior to March 2020.
So instead of a kind of symbolic need to acquire at least $1 million in dollar value to get into entry-level fuck you status, after March 2020 it seems to have become somewhat apparent that need to get to $2 million to achieve a kind practical assurance of reaching entry-level fuck you status, and surely right now since BTC prices are largely bouncing around the 200-week moving average, as I type this post, the BTC spot price and entry-level fuck you status valuation prices happen to be largely aligned at the BTC price of $22,300-ish, which also is currently about 89.7 BTC to reach a $2 million valuation.. not an easy task to achieve such, even if acquiring the BTC in 2016.
For a casual buyer, or someone with low income, it may not be an easy task to achieve. Much as at this particular moment, 1 BTC is
not an easy task an impossible task for me to achieve.
I do think that anyone of moderately affluent middle-class/professional-class means who is serious about Bitcoin could have acquired 100 BTC in 2016. That is tantamount to saying that anyone of moderately affluent middle-class/professional-class means could have bought 1 BTC in 2021–2022. If you are in a rich country, and you are at least moderately well-off, then to put less than $50k into BTC means you are not serious about it.
Not that I have anything against someone who DCAs $10/week; and for many people, that is the only way! Please do not misinterpret me as insulting people who have little, and who scrape together holdings sat by sat. It is admirable; and I damn well know what that type of life position is like! But it is irrelevant, in considering someone of at least moderately affluent means who is serious about BTC.
Seriousness has varying levels, of course. Even I wouldn’t do what CZ did when he got started—that was crazy; selling a home to buy BTC is one of the craziest-ever all-in
gambles! Though I guess that he has probably achieved “fuck you status” by now.
I still had probably enough for Jay to proclaim my “fuck you status” by the end of the decade.
For sure, we have some pretty decent ideas that with the passage of time, it is going to take fewer and fewer BTC to actually reach entry-level fuck you status.
I do believe that at some point, I am going to need to revise some of my projections to make it a wee bit more sloping off rather than constant.., but
at the end of this post that was last edited on December 28, 2021, you can see that I had projected about 0.7 BTC to be sufficient to reach entry-level fuck you status by the end of 2029 - and that presumes at today's dollar prices (so accounting for inflation or purchasing power of today's dollars.. so nominally we might end up getting a bit of a different story by the end of the decade.. fuck? maybe we could be in a very serious implosion of the US Dollar by then.. 7.5 years from now.. can the dollar hang on in any kind of a meaningful credible fashion for another 7.5 years?)..
I had much more than 0.7 BTC. After my first string of BTC losses wiped out
most of my BTC in May, I had a little over 0.5 BTC.
I was
not rich. But from nothing, I had built up to what I would consider sort of the Bitcoiner middle-class.
I have been crushed down to less than 0.05 BTC. Which is still at risk, if the bottom is not in. This is ridiculous!
I don't know if it is ridiculous, even though I would agree with any kind of assessment that there is a certain amount of frustration that exists when these kinds of extreme DOWNity BTC price moves happen.
In addition to calling the market ridiculous, I also meant that it’s ridiculous for me to have less than 0.05 BTC. Dollhouse-sized holding. A child’s toy. And a farce.
Jay, I intended reply to some of your earlier posts. At this point, I am pretty much just firing at random—in this post, and in what I reply to or what I miss. I will try to get back to your earlier replies sometime (famous last words). Perhaps I was too harsh in some of my earlier replies to you; but I don’t think you were entirely fair to me, either. #nohardfeelings